What is Lug Wrench Brewing Co.? It’s a virtual brewery with operations in both New England and Virginia. The ‘company’s’ core beliefs are in hand-crafted brewing, beer exploration, and most importantly, camaraderie. Lug Wrench is a brewery that doesn’t have to worry about profit margins, distribution arrangements, or market share. It gets to focus on the important things: beer and the culture that surrounds it. Lug Wrench Brewing Co. could just be the best brewery you have yet to hear of.

Pages

Monday, July 26, 2010

Brewing Water Chemistry is Your Friend

I recently gave a presentation at my homebrewing club on practical brewing water chemistry. The goal of the talk was to provide an overview of the key aspects of water chemistry that impact the brewing process and what ways they can be manipulated to make improve the resulting beer. This included several specific steps and procedures that homebrewers can take before and during brew day.

Jeff and I figured this information would be of interest to our viewers and I have listed the speaking notes below. Please keep in mind that adjusting water is a relatively advanced brewing technique. Brewers who are starting out should focus on sanitation and fermentation control first before working with water, because these elements make a much greater impact on brewing quality and consistency.

----------------------
1.Why should you care about changing your brewing water?

oYou can make excellent beer without worrying about it at all

oHowever, water adjustments can help fine tune your beers and make good beer even better

oUnderstanding how your mash works, for all-grain brewers can be important

oMany people have trouble brewing beers at ends of the color spectrum, which can be due to water hardness (stouts versus pilsners)

2.Where to start?

oIf you are an extract brewer, you will likely want to do nothing, or if you have hard water, dilute with reverse osmosis (RO) water

§Extract already contains concentrated ions from when the wort was concentrated

§It is difficult to know what the concentrations of those ions are, so you certainly don’t want to add more through brewing salts

§Trial and error, along with getting used to a specific brand of extract, is your best way forward

While brewing water adjustments are a relatively advanced brewing topic, they can be effectively utilized with a little research and trial and error. Hopefully, the information presented above can act as a catalyst to beginning to work with water. Please leave a comment and let us know if it was helpful.

2 comments:

Nice post, Tom. I've just started looking into my water chemistry after noticing a difference between two pale ales from the RIFT single hop pale ale experiment. To one I added some epsom salts, the other I forgot. I think I detected a definite crispness to the treated pale ale (my water is very soft and my Cl:SO4 ratio is waaaay on the malty end). I've been using the EZ Water Adjustment spreadsheet: http://www.ezwatercalculator.com/ and it's pretty awesome.